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by Stijn Schepers on 08 September 2011
The internet is everywhere. You walk along the waterfront in Wellington and you even get free internet. You see tourists using all kinds of devices to plan their travels: iPads, iPhones, mobile phones, laptops, notebooks. They are in a perfect spot to enjoy the beauty of the waterfront while pages are loading slowly. But how fast are New Zealand websites actually? And what makes some of the websites so painfully slow?
At Equinox we have examined the most used websites of New Zealand. We used IE7 over a DSL connection and tested the response time of the landing page. The response time basically means how long it takes to fully load the webpage after entering the URL and pushing enter. The results are astonishing! The study revealed that it took in average 9.45 seconds to fully load the page. Some websites are designed so that they can be used even when not fully loaded but 9.45 seconds is a very long time!
So why are these pages so slow? The most important rule is to keep the amount of requests embedded in a page low. A webpage is basically an HTML document which references objects that are needed to build the page: style sheets, images, JS, Flash videos, ... The more objects are embedded in a page, the more round trips will happen to build up that page. Round trip times are costly. Having less objects embedded in a page does not mean less content or less pictures. It means more optimised images, combining external JS and CSS, combining background images in CSS sprites. So the study revealed that in average, the pages examined consisted out of 58 requests!
With more and more people using their mobile phones to surf the internet, it’s important to keep the size limited. Avoid an “obese” page as the user will not be happy paying their phone bills and waiting for these mega sized pages to be downloaded! The average size of the pages examined is 542 Kbytes. This size equals a 126 pages word document filled with text! Keep web pages compact. Using compression to zip the content; optimise the images to smaller sized files and use the correct image format; minification of text object (HTML,JS,CSS) by removing comments, white spaces, etc. These techniques do not jeopardise the quality of the website. This is an expensive exercise?? No, the cost is very limited; there are a lot of good free tools on the market to optimise pictures and enabling compression can be done by correctly configuring the web server!
Taking the size and amount of embedded page requests into account, you do want to optimise a re-visit of a page by having a correct cache policy applied. A re-visit of the same page should be much faster as the client browser will ideally not go back to the web server to get the images etc, but will use the locally stored files which will both decrease size and amount of round trip times of the page.
Having to wait 9.45 seconds for a page to be fully displayed is what you would have expected in the dark ages. Unfortunately these measurements were done in April 2011! Basic rules of web design should be respected; also if a development framework is used to create the pages more cost efficiently. “It comes out of the box so we can not change it is not an excuse for users to be waiting 10 seconds for the page to be loaded!
The following image shows the relationship between response times, amount of requests and size of a page. An Equinox Optimisation factor quantifies for how well "optimised" the page is (blue line).There are lots of other factors that can slow down a web page from loadingbut the amount of embedded requests, the size of a page and cache settings are the key ones.
